Fig. 4

Network analysis of selected DEGs in cells exposed to from diesel UFP. The initial 545 DEGs were filtered by the presence in the core enrichment of four significant hallmarks GSEA (TNF-α signaling via NF-κB, Inflammatory response, EMT, Xenobiotic metabolism) or by literature mining prioritization; (further details on DEGs selection are in section Material and Methods, and in Additional file 14: Table S9). Of the 129 resulting DEGs, network analysis identified a biological interaction for 122 genes (rounded shape) and 42 further “linker” genes (diamond shape). Some of the most interesting linker genes are investigated in the Discussion section (red board). Grey lines indicate manually curated interactions according to Reactome FI database. Size of DEGs nodes is directly proportional to the number of differentially expressed time points; the FC at each time point in cells exposed to UFP from diesel vs control is also indicated. The complete network inclusive of the predicted interactions is available as Additional file 15: Figure S6